Monday, May 28, 2012

The atheist syndrome

Dr. Shermer characterizes himself as a skeptic. As he confesses in his book, “What I want to believe based on emotions and what I believe based on evidence and empirical data may not coincide. I am a skeptic not because I don’t want to believe, but because I want to know. How can we tell the difference between what we would like to be true or what is actually true” (p. 2)? Dr. Shermer succumbed to skepticism after his girlfriend, Maureen, was critically injured in an auto accident and he appealed to God for her healing. “What finally tipped my belief into skepticism was the problem of evil–if God is all knowing, all powerful, and all good, then why do bad things happen to good people?” “A just and loving God who had the power to heal would surely heal Maureen. He didn’t. He didn’t. I now believe, not because God works in mysterious ways or he has a special plan for Maureen, but because there is no God” (p. 45).

It’s exactly like Lewis Wolpert disbelieving in God as a child when God wouldn’t help him find his cricket bat. People become atheists as children. Not because they have looked at the evidence, but because they expect God to make them feel good, and he doesn’t perform.

This also happened to other atheists like Dan Barker and John Loftus. Barker basically was forced by financial concerns (due to his own fiscal incompetence) to alter his preaching and singing to appeal to liberal Christians, finally ending in atheism. Loftus had an affair with a hot-looking church secretary then complained about being judged for committing adultery. Show me an atheist and I’ll show you a person who is unskilled AT LIFE.

12 comments:

For Loftus, I am talking about this person Linda that he had an affair with:

"...I worked day after day with the executive director, whose’ name was Linda. She practically idolized me. She did everything I said to do, and would call me daily to help her deal with various situations that came up from the running of the Shelter, along with her personal problems. What man doesn’t want to be worshipped? I guess I did. I was having problems with my own relationship with my wife at the time, and Linda made herself available. I succumbed and had an affair with her." (Why I rejected Christianity, pg. 22)

This trend is probably very common among those who reject Christianity. I remember a situation involving the small church in Texas through which I got saved and discipled. Before I joined, there was a young couple who were engaged to be married. Before the wedding, she became pregnant and they ended up confessing their sin before the church. They eventually married and had one other child. The wife was fully repentant and was restored to fellowship. The husband, on the other hand, became very bitter. He left the church and began immersing himself in atheist literature and posted messages on the local university USENET board under the name “Celsus”. He was a bright guy and he became a hero to the college atheist group and on USENET.

At the same time, I was reading a lot of C.S. Lewis as well as J.P. Moreland’s “Scaling the Secular City”, among other things, so his diatribes didn’t have much of an effect on me. He saw it as his mission to destroy our church, however, even to the point of becoming a columnist for the campus paper and making his arguments there, interspersed with articles from an “Austrian school” economic perspective (he was an econ major).

He eventually left his wife and kids to indulge a life of dissipation and to this day, he continues in his unbelief, if his Facebook page (replete with “likes” of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, et al.) is any indication. From him, I learned to never underestimate the motivation of someone who turns their back on God. It also motivates me all the more to “have a ready defense”.

Shermer is certainly not the first person to consider the so-called Problem of Evil and realize that the features of the real world - in this case, events that are horrendous to humans - show it to be inconsistent with the traditional Christian theological conception of God. This isn't, of course, about atheism, per se, but about Christian theology in particular. Apparently this issue is, however, the "trigger" impetus for a lot of Christians to reconsider and then reject their Christian religious beliefs. I would suspect that a lot (if not most) of these people don't become atheists but just change their beliefs about what God really is, perhaps taking some form of deism. But my point is that the "Problem of Evil" is not *just* an emotional issue.

I became an atheist for a, perhaps related, but somewhat different reason, and I've met a lot of other former Christians who are now atheists who became atheists for similar reasons, not having anything to do with experiencing personal tragedies in some way that cause them to consider the Problem of Evil. First was when I realized that the Bible was parochially primitive in regard to the nature of reality, in dealing with and studying about creationism related issues, and also parochially primitive in its theology such as we see in particular in the book of Joshua - by which it dawned on me that there just wan't any good evidence that this book ever came from any god. It was only after those realizations that my thinking developed further over a couple of years or so, while continuing to ponder more general beliefs about God, to the more general position (more general than about just the Bible) of saying that I don't have any reason to think there's any god simply because I'm not aware of any good evidence of one.

Anyway, if it helps you feel better to think that "People become atheists as children. Not because they have looked at the evidence, but because they expect God to make them feel good, and he doesn't perform.", perhaps because you feel it lets you off the hook for producing that good evidence for God atheists keep asking for, then go right and do that. Atheists know better.

Hi steve, I always laugh when a person spews out a stereotype based purely on cliches, without a fact in sight, base on sheer ignorance, without even a smidgeon of intellectual sincerity, accuses me of being just like him. "Nominal faith." "Sunday School understanding of Christian theology." Thank you for showing just how much an awful lot of Christians love to just fabricate anything they feel like saying, based on nothing at all, rather than deal with anything of substance.